Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I've not generally been recording the odd sets of stretches or squats that I fit into regular activities (like waiting for a train), just as I don't record walking around as part of exercise (though I would likely mention a five-mile hike).

A couple of days ago, the_maenad commented on my keeping track of all this; as I noted there, while the data may be useful for something at some point, I rarely go look at previous numbers, and part of this is just keeping happy a piece of my brain that likes to count things. And I'm counting anyway, set by set, so writing it down at the time is easy enough.

I'm not sure if that's the same part of my brain that looks at proof pages at work and immediately points out that 53 and 59 are both prime (relevant to a multiple-choice question in sixth-grade math). Related, probably.

( numbers for yesterday's workout )

Someone said, in a discussion of Flight 93, that she thought it was unreasonable for most Americans, especially those who don't live within a day's drive of New York City, to have taken the 9/11 attacks personally or be traumatized thereby. She said that she thought most of the trauma was because of [I'd guess news] media "exploitation" of images of the attack. (I'm not linking this time, because the person who originally posted is seeming a little overwhelmed, and has asked that we drop that thread.)

I don't have an exact definition for a day's drive, but I did some quick proxy numbers, courtesy of the census. I figured that the number of people who live in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware [thanks, Nancy], or Maryland would do as a very rough approximation: some parts of upstate New York and western Pennsylvania are a long day's drive from New York City, but some parts of Virginia are well within reach.

That's about 56 million people, or just over one out of every six Americans.

Now consider the mobility of modern Americans--there are a lot of people elsewhere in the U.S. who grew up here (my brother has lived in Texas for 20 years), have close family here, or both.

[Given that the original subject was Flight 93, not the two that hit New York, people in a day's drive of the Pentagon might reasonably be included as well, but I was in part just curious about where people live these days.]

I've been doing cardio and lifting weights semi-regularly for the last few years (semi-regularly meaning usually two or three times a week, but with breaks for travel and the occasional illness). As part of that, I keep notes of what exercises I've done, what weight, and how many reps, in the form "calf machine, 75 pounds, 13, 11; 70 pounds, 11". These are for my own reference, so I don't worry that someone else may not know what calf machine I'm talking about. (These are most of what goes behind the cut tags.)

I was thinking, today, that the numbers may be getting in the way of focusing on the exercise itself, and of paying attention to my body and how I feel as I exercise.

So I'm considering dropping the record-keeping for a bit, and seeing how it feels. Replacing the nice neat lists with just something like "2/21, a good workout" or "went to the gym, but stopped early because I wasn't into it."

Has anyone here tried stopping keeping the sort of records I've been doing? If so, what effects did you notice?

[cross-posted from irongirls, in slightly different form]